When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G?
When did you last get 100Mbit+ speeds with 4G?
I would liken the situation to 2007 in Australia. Sending instant messages was basically free from the telco's perspectives - but they charged 20c or something to the sender. Insane margins.
The first company that I remember challenging that was Apple, who bypassed the whole business and enabled essentially free text messages with iMessage. 10 years later, the markup on using text messages seems to have been completely wiped out. Apple also happened to be the most profitable company in the world through that period.
Sure, iMessage isn't linked directly to the profits, yet somehow the invisible hand seems to have been working.
Market entry is difficult because it's gated by spectrum availability. It's hard for new competitors to offer wireless services. The market for wireless services in most countries is very cozy - it's usually one or two incumbent carriers that are about the same size, own about the same amount of spectrum, and don't work very hard to take market share from each other. I would argue that in a lot of cases, wireless services markets are stuck in a Nash equilibrium.
Smart regulation that might fix this would be to outlaw service contracts and cancellation fees to allow consumers to exploit pricing 'mistakes' (which is how you'd break a Nash equilibrium), and maybe force the carriers to re-bid on their spectrum every 5 years. Unfortunately another common problem with wireless services is regulatory capture - in my country, all the regulators who watch the wireless industry also end up working for it.
There’s a reason it got bought for 22 billion. The telcos were digging their own walled garden grave.
Counterargument: there are fundamental reasons for data caps. To provide service at a high speed to lots of people at a reasonable price, edge-case data users must be throttled. Increasing capacity reduces the number of users who must be throttled.
So it doesn't depend on time of day, but how many other customers are sharing your tower.
https://www.t-mobile.com/customer/mydatausage.html
> Data prioritization will only be noticeable when you access a congested tower and have used over 50GB of data in a particular billing cycle. You will continue to get unlimited high speed data on your smartphone when you aren’t accessing a congested tower. In that way it’s different from data throttling, which slows you down for the remainder of your bill cycle regardless of network conditions, all the time.
Tmobile does have some prepaid plans and older grandfathered plans, but the ONE plan is pretty good, especially at the multi-line rates.
So yes, I’d expect cell service to get either cheaper or better over time instead of more expensive and worse.
It looks like MintSIM is the cheap option now, they do 5GB for $30 or 10GB for $38.
T-mobile doesn’t even charge for roaming on a whole bunch of countries. In my Australia vacation I didn’t even need to buy a new SIM card. Whatsapp and google maps all the way.
Their speeds also beat Sprint and AT&T. It’s the only carrier I have faith that screws it’s consumers the least.
AT&T has my blood on its hands by charging me $500 for roaming in Canada when I didn’t even cross the border.
T-mobile is a night and day difference.
It is important to note that data is not consumed at the same speed it is downloaded at.
Alternatively, are you suggesting (on a website that is ostensibly about venture capitalism) that the entire foundation of economics and markets is shakey?
I hate when these anti-market socialist/communist type comments pop up. Everyone hates their ISP/cellular provider and mindlessly upvotes nonsense like this. There's zero truth to what you're saying!
In order for the left to justify their agenda, they try to make it seem that it's pointless to try to create new value because of things like cartels, monopolies, etc. They then present the conclusion that the only way for a person to improve their financial position is to take from others.